Spiderman: Edge of Time Review

There have been many Spiderman games over the years.  Some have been bad, some have been very bad, but recently it appeared that Beenox would be steering the web slinger in the right direction when they released Spiderman: Shattered Dimensions.  Certainly not a sequel, Spiderman: Edge of Time spins it own tangled web of a story.  While entertaining in the true sense of a graphic novel, the game is addled with redundant gameplay mechanics, and a boring overall package.

Spiderman: Edge of Time has a fairly entertaining premise.  Present day Spiderman, and Spiderman from the future must work together to foil the plans of a time travelling mad man.  The game plays out on two planes of time, one in the present day, and the other in the year 2099.  The alternate universe that has emerged from the tampering of history, is one where an evil corporation has taken control.  Your job is put the past right, to save the future, and to do that you’ll need to work together with Spiderman from the future to accomplish your goal. An interesting premise indeed.

From a visual perspective, Spiderman: Edge of Time is a pretty good looking game.  Since you’ll be playing in two alternate realities you get a nice change of scenery as you bounce from character to character in your quest to save the world.  Make no mistakes about Spiderman: Edge of Time,  it’s an action button masher to the core.  Chaining together combinations is your primary objective as you beat the daylights out of droves and droves of enemies.  To mix up the combat a little, each character has a special move.  Spidey from the present moves at a much fast rate when activating his special move, and allows you to get off multiple combinations at a feverish pace.  The bad part about it, you can’t really see where your character is.  Spidey from the future can send out a decoy, while then turning invisible for a short period giving you ample opportunity to beat up on your foes.  The combat is repetitive because you seemingly never really run out of special powers, and the enemies really don’t force you to change up the combat strategy.

While there is a tree of moves to purchase with in-game spider-currency,  they do little to liven up the combat.  Possibly because the game does little to mix up the action.  Except for a handful of sections in the game’s relatively short campaign, you are simply tasked with finding keys, opening doors, and moving forward.  Thankfully Beenox also incorporated the feature to see which enemy is carrying the key so you don’t have to fight through every enemy on the board to get what you need to progress.  That being said, some of the harder battles in the game can simply be avoided by targeting the enemy with the key, killing him, then hightailing it through the door.

Boss battles are as repititous as the standard combat, and really offer little if anything to look forward to when making your way through any of the game’s acts.  They all have very easy to determine patterns that offer very little challenge, but what’s a few more hundred button mashes in the scheme of the Spiderman: Edge of Time campaign?

You may find some solace in the story of Edge of Time.  If you can stand the ultra repetitive gameplay, and the mediocre mechanics, there are some twists and turns to be seen for the true-blue Spiderman fan.

After Beenox impressed with Spiderman: Shattered Dimensions, I think I just expected more from Edge of Time.  The monotony of the game really stands out, even in it’s fairly short campaign. If Shattered Dimensions was two steps forward, Edge of Time was three steps back.